And then she fainted; she folded up and fell to the ground. I had to yank my hand free to avoid being pulled over. Two other Roma women came across and bent over her; one was grinning.
An act
, I thought.
Sucker
.
‘That looked pretty dramatic,’ said Santi, as I rejoined him at the bus stop.
‘All bullshit,’ I told him.
‘Don’t you mean cowshit, in this case?
‘I suppose. Here, you can have this.’ I handed him the sprig of heather; he pushed its stalk through an unused buttonhole in his shirt, just as the open-topped tour bus pulled up at the stop.
We took seats upstairs, right at the front; there were audio guides available, but with Santi as a commentator, I didn’t need one. He began as soon as we pulled away, explaining where we were, place by place. The tour began by taking us out of the city and up towards the Alhambra. It was a clear day, and so we had a fine view of the Sierra Nevada, the mountain range that’s one of the great surprises of southern Spain. Think Spain, think Pyrenees; that’s how it is for most people, but the Snowy Mountains are more dominant, and those who do such things tell me that the skiing and snow-boarding are more reliable there than in the north. Santi was a skier, as it turned out; he had taken it up once he could afford it, but in his youth and Gerard’s it had been a luxury scorned by their father.
He knew just about everything there was to know about the city and its history, ancient and modern, from the expulsion of the Moors . . . ‘In case you haven’t noticed,’ he joked as the bus passed a gaggle of young mothers, all with heads covered, ‘they’ve found their way back’ . . . and the death of the poet Lorca during the Spanish Civil War. ‘Granada Airport is named after him,’ he told me. ‘One thing I’ve noticed in my job is the number of airports named after people who’ve been shot. Think about it; apart from him, there’s JFK, La Guardia, also in New York, John Lennon in Liverpool, Abraham Lincoln in Illinois, Ronald Reagan in Washington . . . although he survived . . . and Charles de Gaulle.’
‘De Gaulle wasn’t assassinated,’ I pointed out.
‘Only because of incredible luck. So many people tried to shoot him, he deserves to be on the list.’
I laughed. In truth I was grateful for the distraction, because for all that I was interested in what he was telling me, my mind kept drifting back to the gypsy woman and what she had said. I’ve always convinced myself that fortune telling, be it centred on palmistry, tea leaves, tarot cards or anything else, is based on probability, and on intelligent guesswork. But her insistent use of the word ‘father’ had lodged itself in my brain. Did she mean my dad? That was possible; most of us outlive our fathers and the way she had put it, that’s where she was most likely to have been taking me. But had she meant Tom’s father? I wear a wedding ring, so it was a fair chance that I was a mother. I was alone, for she hadn’t noticed Santi, I was sure. Yes, another good guess. But . . . the thought that wouldn’t go away, however hard I pushed it, what if there was something in the whole claptrap nonsense? What if she’d meant Father Gerard?
The bus tour ended where it had begun, but we stayed on board until it arrived at the Alhambra for the second time. Santi explained that the greatest benefit of the bono turistica lies in the fact that it includes an advance booking time for the Alhambra, or specifically, for entry to the Nazrene Palaces, the heart of the place, and it lets you bypass the regular ticket queue, which can be enormous.
By the time we got to the main concourse, breakfast had worn off; we grabbed sandwiches and beer before Santi led me into the Alcazabar, the castellated fort that was the earliest construction on the great rock.
There’s a lot I could tell you about the Alhambra, but I’ll restrict myself to three things: one, although the place as a whole is vast, the Nazrene Palaces are smaller than I’d expected; two, there is a very fine art collection in the Carlos Five palace; and three, it has the finest public toilets in all of Spain. After three hours we’d visited the lot, and were ready to leave. I’d have taken the bus, but Santi promised me that it would have been a nightmare, so we settled for a taxi, back to Goats’ Hill, or as close to it as the driver could take us.
‘Put your feet up for a while,’ said Santi, as we stepped back indoors. ‘I’m going to see what’s in my mailbox.’
‘Do you have a computer here?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘No. I have an iPhone; for my job, it’s best.’
He left to get on with it, and I went outside, on to the patio. The sun was still high, so I unrolled the awning that was fixed above the doors. As I settled myself into a chair, I couldn’t help wondering what state my email must have reached, and from that to those people who were likely to have sent me messages. As I scrolled down my mental contacts list, I paused at a name, and found myself wondering why I hadn’t thought of him before.
As I did, it suddenly occurred to me that the old Primavera wouldn’t be hiding out waiting for her luck to take a turn for the better; the old Primavera would be doing all she could to make that happen. Fond as I was of Gerard . . . oh hell, much as I loved him . . . I’d allowed him to take me so far under his wing that I hadn’t bothered to look out. First chance I had, I promised myself, that was going to change.
Thirty-eight
T
hat was for later, though; I didn’t want to ask Santi if I could use his tricky wee phone, and I didn’t want to try to access the internet on mine, because it was my point of contact with home, and I didn’t want to risk running out of credit. So I kicked off my shoes, wiggled my toes in the sunshine, and sat for a couple of hours, trying to be patient.
When Santi reappeared, he had changed into a white shirt and what appeared to be the trousers of the suit I had seen in the wardrobe. ‘I’ve booked us a table for dinner,’ he said.
Immediately, I thought of my wardrobe, the ill-considered selection of garments that I had rammed into my haversack. ‘Where?’ I asked, cautiously. ‘Nowhere too posh, I hope.’
‘I believe it calls itself avant garde. That embraces all things.’
I had a skirt, hanging in the bedroom, a shirt that I still hadn’t worn, and a belt, but . . . ‘Please tell me you have an iron,’ I ventured.
‘Of course,’ he laughed. ‘I’m what they call a new man.’
I found it, and an ironing board, in a cupboard off the kitchen. An hour and a half later, after a shower, and a little pampering with the scraps of make-up I had brought with me, I was ready. I had found some shampoo in the bathroom cabinet, and a hair dryer. Maybe they belonged to the co-pilot too: I didn’t care; the shampoo was L’Oreal Professional (I’m worth it) and the dryer worked. While I was putting the finishing touches to my still unfamiliar chestnut hair, I took a good look at my roots. They weren’t too bad, but another treatment was going to be needed in the next couple of days.
Our bono passes entitled us to a few rides on public buses, as well as to the tourist trip. Santi said that we’d be quicker taking one of those into town than waiting for a taxi in the Albacin, and so we did just that. It took quite a while, but eventually we got off at a big junction, outside a very posh ice-cream shop. We walked down a busy shopping thoroughfare called Calle Recogidas, the street of the harvests, but not very far before Santi announced, ‘We’re here.’
Our destination turned out to be a five-star hotel called Palacio de los Patos, that’s Ducks’ Palace to you, although the first things I saw as we approached the entrance were two white marble swans, in something that looked like a long basin. I guessed that whoever had done the décor had decided that
patos
were too downmarket for five stars and had gone for
cisnes
instead. We passed them by, Santi leading the way, turned a corner and trotted down a few steps to arrive at a restaurant called Senzone. We were fairly early by Spanish standards, but there were a few diners already at their tables; I glanced at the women and felt decidedly underdressed.
The maître d’ was actually a maîtress, a very efficient lady who greeted Santi as ‘Captain Hernanz’ and showed us to a table beside a small green pool with twin fountains. She gave us each menus and handed Santi the wine list, but he asked her for a bottle of Segura Viudas Lamit Brut Rosado. All I knew about that was that it was going to be cava, and pink, but when it arrived and I tasted it, I was seriously impressed. I made a mental note to check whether Ben Simmers stocked it, and if not, to ask him to find me a case.
‘So you’re a captain,’ I said, as we studied the menu.
‘That’s my title.’
‘How long have you been flying commercially?’
‘For ten years now. I qualified as a military pilot when I was twenty-one. I flew Hornet fighters, although only ever in training exercises, I’m happy to say. When I was twenty-six, they made me what you would call a squadron leader, but I was transferred to transport planes, mostly great turbo-prop brutes like the Hercules and C 295, but also the Boeing 707; we had three of those in my time. They were used for transport and aerial refuelling.’
‘That must have been exciting.’
‘Nah, it was boring; fighters are where you want to be. I tried to get back there, but there were no openings at my rank, so after three years, I resigned my commission, and found a job as a commercial pilot. Fact is, I was lucky; some airlines have a certain resistance to military pilots . . . they see them as risk-takers . . . but it was my experience of flying those Boeing 707s that got me in. I was a co-pilot for a couple of years, then I made the jump into the top seat.’
‘What do you fly?’
‘The Airbus 340, on long-haul routes; my last trip was to Los Angeles.’
‘My sister lives there.’
‘I know; I’ll be flying her, and her family in September, LAX to Barajas; first class, naturally. When they do our schedule, sometimes they give us a heads up on VIPs booked on our flights.’
I shuddered. ‘They’re coming to visit Tom and me. I hope I’ll be around to entertain them.’
‘Is there a chance that you won’t?’ He paused. ‘I’m not prying; I don’t want to know any more than you’ve told me already. Indeed, let’s forget that you even told me that much. I can’t know any details for my own security. You’re a friend of my brother the priest, that’s all. He’s insistent that I should always be able to deny knowledge of your situation.’
‘Understood. But to answer your question, there’s no chance. I’m going to sort this thing out, and get back home as soon as I can.’
A waiter arrived at that moment, putting an end to the discussion. We made our choices from the nouvelle menu, and Santi chose a bottle of Pesquera Reserva from the list, to go with the steak that we had chosen as our main course.
As we ate, he told me of his work, and of the places he’d seen. Some of them I’ve visited myself, and others are still on my ‘One day’ list, including India, but it’ll be a while before I can get round to that. He asked me about my parents; he seemed fascinated by the sort of people who could have produced Dawn and me. I told him that Mum was no longer with us, and hadn’t been for five years, but that Dad was soldiering on, filling his days by carving ever more elaborate chess sets, selling the originals for a small fortune and, more recently, giving reproduction rights to specific models to one of Britain’s biggest retail chains. ‘If anyone else called him eccentric,’ I said, ‘I’d be on them like a rockfall . . . but the truth is, he is. How about your father?’ I asked him, just a little hesitantly. ‘You told me Gerard inherited the house when your mother died. Does that mean that he’s dead too?’
‘No, it doesn’t, for the house was always my mother’s, so he had no claim on it.’ He frowned. ‘He is, though, at least I believe he is. About twelve years ago, when I was still in the military, I decided that it would be best if I knew where he was, if only to make sure that he could never come back to give my mother a hard time. So I asked Jorge Lavorante to try to trace him. It wasn’t difficult; he’d got into trouble in Cadiz, got into a brawl and wound up in court. Jorge checked and found that he was still there.’
‘So you know he died there?’
‘No, not for sure. As I said, I believe,’ he leaned on the word, ‘he died there, that’s all.’
‘Why?’
‘Irena wouldn’t make a complaint against him, yet in the end he was responsible for her death, and for ruining my brother’s life. That sat badly with me, so . . .’ He frowned into his wine glass, then turned to look me in the eye. ‘There was nothing the police could do about him, so I took other measures. Irena’s uncle, the one she lived with when she came from Cartagena to be with Gerard . . . let’s just say he was a lot less legal than he should have been. I went to see him and I gave him the old man’s address. “Thank you very much,” he said. “I appreciate that.” Although I never made any further inquiries, I’m not in any doubt about the outcome.’
‘Does anyone else know about this?’ I asked him quietly.
‘You’re the first person I’ve ever told, and you’ll be the last. I’ve only shared it with you because I know I can trust you never to pass it on to my brother . . . not as long as I’m alive, at any rate.’
‘If that’s what you want, I’ll promise and I’ll keep my word. But don’t you think he has a right to know about this? He must wonder himself what happened to him.’